


Domestic Creatures

by missmungoe



Category: One Piece
Genre: (I love that this is a tag?), F/M, So Married
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-20
Updated: 2016-11-20
Packaged: 2018-09-01 03:38:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,772
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8605816
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/missmungoe/pseuds/missmungoe
Summary: "Coming or going?"Or, scenes from a marriage.





	

**Author's Note:**

> What can I say? I have a heart for these two.

“Coming or going?”

It was a familiar question, spoken at the heels of his arrival and usually before the door had had time to swing shut behind him – a routine, honed by long years; an old humour in an even older query, shaped and polished by countless departures and arrivals.

Shakky watched him shrug off his coat, and there was a glass in her hand, pushed across the bar-top before he’d even crossed the room. Calloused fingers brushed against hers – once, deliberately. Another old gesture, for people who’d spent a long time saying things without words.

But, “It depends,” Rayleigh said, settling into his usual chair, the glass lifted halfway to his lips.

“On?”

That smile still hadn’t changed from the first time she’d seen it directed her way. And it still made her heart settle – not leap like a girl’s, but ease itself into a pace that beat with surety against her ribcage.

“On the lady’s wishes,” her husband said, knocking his drink back. The low sun slanting through the windows glinted off his glasses, and with a cluck of her tongue, she reached out to pluck them from his nose.

“Ara – you’ve gotten these dirty again.”

The smile tugging at the corner of his mouth told her he’d heard the answer, although it really was a matter of routine more than any genuine doubt that she’d welcome him back. But they were old people now – old pirates, in this world full of youngsters gunning for the top. Small routines and comforts were to be treasured, like a good vintage, and the setting sun over the archipelago.

And the ease found in their shared presence, felt in the little, unspoken things – her tender placement of his glasses on his nose, and the brief kiss against her wrist in return.

“Welcome home, old man.”

Rayleigh’s grin stretched against her skin, and when his laughter rumbled out of him, Shakky poured him another drink.

 

—

 

“Coming or going?”

She was seated at the bar, her back turned and with an open newspaper spread out on the counter top before her, and Rayleigh felt his smile curve at the intuitive question, asked before he’d taken so much as a step inside.

He watched her shoulder blades shifting beneath her shirt, and the arch of her neck; all her easy and familiar movements carried the years with far more grace than his own managed these days.

“There’s trouble,” he said then, by way of answer, and offered a touch to her shoulder as he came to stand beside her. She didn’t often ask about the business he got into outside of ship coating, although likely because she knew all about it – no one on the archipelago was quite as informed as his wife.

Shakky inclined her head, the sleek cut of her jaw tilted and a dark brow arched. “ _You_ are trouble,” she reminded him, and Rayleigh felt his laughter pull loose, some of the tension bleeding from his shoulders as she lifted the bottle sitting at her elbow, to pour him a drink.

He tossed it back with a sigh. “Hopefully enough that they’ll cancel each other out.”

Her smile quirked at that, but there were old things in her eyes – a keen knowledge that things didn’t always work that way. But she’d been wrought from the same waters as he had, and so she didn’t tell him to be careful. Instead what she said was, “One more before you go?”

“Thank you.”

“Just remember to pay your tab this time.”

The glass fogged with his laughter as he knocked it back, before putting it down on the bar-top. “With the price you charge, I’ll have to come back and do it later. I don’t have that kind of cash on me.”

He saw her smile widen, and as he turned to leave Shakky averted her gaze back to the paper with an ease that had never been feigned.

“See that you do.”

 

— 

 

Some days she wouldn’t have time to ask – she’d hear the door creak and turn, the familiar words at the tip of her tongue, but then his hands would be in her hair, and a kiss would steal all her questions and her breath.

And she wouldn’t ask, on those days – or remind him that he was far too old to be kissing her like a man just out of boyhood. Instead she plucked his glasses from the bridge of his nose and wound her fingers through his hair, tugging until she knew it hurt, because if he should feel anything on days like this it would be _her_.

She usually liked smoking after sex, but she had no mind for it now, and she felt his gratitude in the silent press of his palm against her back, fingertips touching against the tips of her hair.

She didn’t ask about the human market, or the things he’d been unable to do. They were old creatures with old failures, and there was time enough to linger on those later, under the harsh light of day – not now in the muted darkness of their bedroom.

And so, “Good man,” she said instead, speaking the words around a contented hum as questing fingers tugged at an errant lock of silver hair. And then – smile curving wicked against his collar, holding things he couldn’t see but that she knew he would hear, in the words that followed,

“One more before you go?”

 

—

 

“He’s a sweet boy,” she said, considering the wanted poster. “Monkey-chan.”

“Hmm,” Rayleigh agreed, smile lifting, bright with a quiet pride that Shakky had always thought looked at home on his face. The same sort of pride that resurfaced whenever the names 'Buggy the Clown' or 'Red-Haired Shanks' appeared in the paper.

It would seem Monkey D. Luffy had made it onto the list, and she felt her own smile curve, thumb brushing against the small scar below his eye, wondering how it had gotten there, but – remembering the boy with his too-large movements and quick laughter – she knew it had to be something reckless.

She didn’t say _imagine if we’d had one like that,_ but she knew her husband heard it, in the way her touch lingered by the picture. But she’d never allowed herself to feel regret that that particular blessing hadn’t been bestowed upon them, in all their years. There were so many orphans on these vast seas, and the world had so keenly demonstrated the dangers of being born of the wrong kind of blood.

Although – considering her husband, with all his pride to give, she sometimes couldn’t help but wonder.

A drag of her cigarette, and she felt her shoulders relax a bit, a hum sitting low in her throat. “Something tells me he’ll need help,” she said then, tapping a finger against the grinning face on the poster. “Too much unrestrained energy and all that.”

She watched Rayleigh’s eyes lift to settle on her face, and felt the understanding that sat in the weight of his gaze. “I hear that’s a problem with the young these days.”

“All the more reason for _you_ to give him some pointers. Being so old.”

His chuckle fell with a shake of his head. “And it’s the fate of the old to herald a new generation,” he mused, but there was a strange spark of something in his expression then – like determination, and she was tempted to tell him he’d never looked younger when he met her gaze with a smile, and said,

“Perhaps it wouldn’t be the worst legacy to leave behind.”

 

—

 

War broke loose, with just about as much bombast as was expected, certain participants taken into consideration.

There wasn’t any use asking now, and so what she said instead was, “Have a care with those old bones.”

She watched his grin quirk, and the sun glinting off his glasses. He’d done a poor job polishing them, and she kept herself from pointing it out, itching fingers tucked against her elbows as she leaned her weight on the bar-top.

“I’ll be back,” Rayleigh said, pulling his coat about his shoulders, like it was any other day and all that awaited him were ships to coat. As though the world was the same as it had been yesterday, although they both knew it wasn’t.

“Yes,” Shakky said with a long exhale, when the door had clicked shut behind him. She hadn’t asked how long and he hadn’t offered, not out of doubt that he would return, but simply because it wasn’t their way of doing things.

Although, she mused silently – a trust as old as theirs didn’t break easily, or even dent, but even as she trusted her husband implicitly, the world…

Now that was a different matter altogether.

 

— 

 

The mattress dipped, and she was awake before she felt the tender touch to her shoulder, but didn’t open her eyes to greet the quiet shadows – or her husband’s, darker still and settling over the room with palpable weight.

A year and a half of sleeping alone, and she felt the wrongness of it most keenly not with his absence but with his return – with the familiar dip of the mattress at her back, and his heavy sigh ghosting along her neck. He hadn’t taken off his glasses, and she felt the cold touch of them against her skin. And he smelled of sweat and sea salt – he hadn’t stopped to clean up, and although that was usually a sign that he was headed elsewhere, only dropping by–

“Staying?” Shakky asked, with a surety that rendered the question obsolete, but then that was the way they had always done things.

She felt his answer in the smile curving against the back of her neck, and when she shifted he followed, old limbs rearranging themselves until they fit, and the mattress sinking beneath their collective weight like a sigh.

“You could have washed up,” she scolded softly, nose tucked against his throat where she felt his pulse leap.

“An old man forgets such things,” came the laughing rumble, and the tightening of a strong arm around her shoulders.

“Hmm. Monkey-chan?” Shakky asked then, already well on her way back to sleep, eyes heavy, and the smell of the sea in her nose.

“Ready to take the world by storm.”

“And you?”

His nose pressed against her hair, and when he spoke there was a year and a half of unspoken things in his voice, tired but tinged with something startlingly pleased, like a man who’d done something right and felt it all the way to the marrow of his bones.

“Ready to sleep.”


End file.
